Deroy Murdock, National Review:

As the Obama administration marks 18 months in power today, no one should be terribly surprised that it is the hardest-Left U.S. government since that of FDR. For those who paid attention, Obama’s hyperliberal U.S. Senate record pierced like a dive light through the squid ink of Hope and Change that Obama squirted at anyone who demanded programmatic specifics. (At 95.5 percent in 2007, according to the National Journal, Obama was the Senate’s No. 1 Left-liberal.)

However, after Obama’s nearly flawless campaign, the big surprise one and a half years after Obama’s momentous and truly moving inauguration is the staggering incompetence of his government. Like some Americans, I expected a nanny-state, socialist agenda from Obama & Co. However, I thought that at least they would manage things smoothly and professionally, in somewhat refreshing contrast to the general ineptitude of the detached, tongue-tied Bush-Rove years. Instead, what America and the world have witnessed is an extravaganza of frequent gaffes, blunders, and catastrophes…

Racist.

I’m thinking the last attempt we put out to stay up-to-date on this was here, when it was a completely different cast & production crew. Not sure what happened to that effort, but now things have been all ripped apart and pieced back together yet one more time.

If there’s a production with a longer and more colorful history behind its troubled march to the silver screen than Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged,” the story of that particular episode of development hell has not yet been told. Published in 1957 and a perennial bestseller ever since (the novel sold a half-million copies just last year), the struggle to realize Rand’s sprawling and epic dramatization of her theory of Objectivism as told through a dystopian tale of the world’s best and brightest, feeling they’ve been exploited by an ungrateful society, putting their talent on strike, eluded even the author herself.

Throughout the decades, stars from Barbara Stanwyck to Angelina Jolie have expressed interest in bringing the novel to life, but it’s going to be producers Harmon Kaslow and John Aglialoro who finally break the curse. Directed by Paul Johansson, who also stars as John Galt, and co-starring Taylor Schilling as Dagny Taggart and Matthew Marsden as James Taggart, principal photography wrapped this very day. Which means…

Yes, there will be an “Atlas Shrugged” movie. Well, at least a part one.

Pictured at right is Taylor Schilling, who is cast as Dagny Taggart. I had Dagny pegged as brunette — a studious, anal-retentive, details-oriented, sexually-repressed, Madam Librarian brunette.

Hey, when the goddamn thing is 1,100 pages long these mental images are important.

I always pegged Mel Gibson for Hank Rearden. No way in hell is that going to happen at this point.

This stopping-and-starting, so many times around the same silly loop, is disconcerting I’ll have to admit. But in all seriousness my tentative opinion is that the story is un-film-able. I’m not willing to swear to that; I’d say exactly the same thing about Lord of the Rings.

So as far as what’s possible, I’d say yes you can do a decent job with this, maybe even a job remembered fondly by most Atlas Shrugged fans. But I’ll say this much: Things would have to be dropped out, even in a trilogy. Sideplots will have to be jettisoned, ignored. Someone, somewhere, is gonna be pissed.

On that, I’ll bet some real money.

Regarding Ms. Schilling, I’m undecided. I can certainly see the potential.

Hat tip to Gateway Pundit.

Huffington Post:

It’s the 30th anniversary of the comedy classic “Airplane!”. So why not spend the holiday weekend celebrating the quotable lines that influenced generations of comedies and filmmakers. We admit it — there are plenty of great lines that didn’t make the cut. But the overabundance of amazing lines actually overloaded my brain and knocked me out. Hell, when I came to, I thought I was Ethel Merman. Anyway, pick your favorite quote and feel free to leave any forgotten quotes in the comments!

Yeah, I’m thinking slide #3 is gonna take this one.

Yahoo Finance:

The economic recovery has been helped in large part by the spending of the most affluent. Now, even the rich appear to be tightening their belts.

Late last year, the highest-income households started spending more confidently, while other consumers held back. But their confidence has since ebbed, according to retail sales reports and some economic analysis.

“One of the reasons that the recovery has lost momentum is that high-end consumers have become more jittery and more cautious,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Analytics.

That cautious attitude stems in part from concerns about global instability, especially in Europe, and in part from the volatility of the stock market in recent months. Major stock indexes fell sharply on Friday, after several big companies announced disappointing earnings. Bank stocks were the biggest losers as investors wrestled with the twin issues of lower trading profits from Citibank and Bank of America and the prospect that new financial regulation would further crimp their businesses.

Though stock performance has a bigger psychological and financial impact on high-income households, consumers of all income levels are fretting more about their financial future, perhaps bracing for the possibility of another economic contraction. Consumer confidence slumped in July to its lowest point since August 2009 in the Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan index released on Friday.

The Dow Jones industrial average slipped 261.41 points to 10,097.9 on Friday, for a loss of 2.52 percent. For the year, broad-based stock indexes in the United States all show losses of more than 3 percent.

Huh, well maybe the poor people will get us over the hump.

Picked up any paychecks from poor people lately?

Here are the two videos. From Breitbart. I have nothing to add and I’m almost certain you’ve seen them before; just doing my bit to get ’em out there. It’s important.

But by all means, continue to make the unceasing demands for the Tea Party people to purge racism from their ranks. </sarcasm>

Update: Via Cassy, just returned from her vacation, we see over at Hot Air that Ms. Sherrod has resigned over the comments. The wasp is dead, the nest remains.

Is President Obama going to get started sometime soon on healing America’s racial divide and starting this glorious, post-racial-animosity period of our nation’s history? Like, any week now? Or is that still a ways off? Because lately, the people in positions of power don’t seem to be very much dedicated to the vision.

Every now and then I’ll get a compliment on blogging that is something to the effect of “I’ve been trying to find the words to express something and I haven’t been able to find them, but you managed to find them and string ’em together for me.”

Well, I have that reaction to some things, too. Scott Payne, writing in the Washington Examiner, speaks for my optimistic side in predicting that we are nearing “The End of the Popularity Contest” in national politics.

This is one of two good things about the presidency of Barack Obama. They’re both lessons for young people: One, you can achieve power and authority by speaking as if you are worthy of it; and two, “fun” people tend to make wretched decisions. The second of those two lessons requires repetition before people will really get it, but we have over nine hundred more days for it to be repeated. My belief is that it’s going to get learned, but good.

…[T]here is this pervasive notion within the Washington bubble, a notion that is particularly strong in the White House, is that the opposition to the administration’s agenda is merely a matter of confusion and that all it will take to flip voters is to have the President explain the measures and reassure Americans that he has everything well in hand. That notion is rapidly coming to and end…

It’s not so much that Americans don’t understand the President’s legislative victories, as it is that those victories are, almost by design, destined to disappoint a majority of voters.
:
No amount of glad handing and photo oping will overcome real and sincere divisions of opinion on public policy. And that is the road block against which the Obama administration is starting to bump up — with a vengeance.

This has been going on for over a year by now: Barack Obama’s popularity rating is drastically different from His approval rating. In poll after poll after poll, respondents assert that they really “like Him as a person” but “disapprove of His policies” and think we as a nation are “heading in the wrong direction.”

Recent blogroll addition Stephen Browne, writing about something else altogether, has nailed it I believe. And the fault doesn’t go to Obama, it goes to the people who voted for Him and are so slow to catch on to what’s happening:

So how does a reasonably intelligent person guard against the temptations of self-deception? The insidious desire to bend our perception of reality to what is comfortable, rather than what is needed to cope with an often uncomfortable reality?

A number of things have been recommended by the wise: studying logic and in particular the informal fallacies, studying rhetoric to learn to recognize the tropes of persuasion, and studying history — which is, after all, the record of other people’s experience.

What I came up with was a series of questions, to try and keep myself intellectually honest:

1. How often have you changed or abandoned a deeply held belief because of either 
(a) personal experience or (b) a persuasive argument backed by compelling evidence?

2. How often have you, after examining the evidence reached a conclusion that was uncomfortable, unsettling, or profoundly disturbing to you, i.e., reached a conclusion you did not like and wished weren’t true?

3. How often have you admitted honest confusion about an issue that was important to you and decided to defer judgment — or simply live with the uncertainty?

4. How often have you realized while listening to someone speak for a position you agreed with, that it was nonetheless being supported by a weak or invalid argument?

5. How often have you listened to two sides of an issue and concluded that you agreed with someone you disliked and disagreed with someone you liked?

If you answered “never” to all or most of them, you might ask yourself whether you are thinking at all. You almost certainly won’t, though.

Now, my ego is about as bloated and tender as anybody else’s, and perhaps if my life’s circumstances allowed me to I could’ve answered “never” to all five of these questions. As it happens, my answer is “Where the hell do you want me to start listing them Mr. Browne?” for all of them…but this is not a testament to my wisdom or my saintly Spock-like handling of logic. I just don’t have the luxury of straying too far from reality. If I believe in a whole bunch of bullshit, I can’t fix stuff, and then I have no skills I can bring to market. If you’re any kind of a farmer, you’re in the same boat. Or an architect or a construction worker or a surgeon.

But most people aren’t kept on this kind of a leash. Most people can believe in silly false things, and never meet up with any consequences for having wrong opinions. If they want to be able to answer in the affirmative about Mr. Browne’s questions, they must rely on their own internal discipline in order to do so, and most people do not have this discipline. I would not so quickly count myself among the ones who do, either, let’s be clear on that. I like to think I’m perfect in every conceivable way just like anybody else does. But I know I’m mortal and flawed.

I think I like Questions #4 and #5 the best. Combine those together, really, and you can dispense with the other three and administer a single test: A person for whom you have positive feelings, on a personal level, and want to please — articulates a position with which you happen to agree, but arrives there by means of a logical process you know is flawed. Does the flaw make an impression on you or does it not?

This is the sin that was committed by young Obama voters two years ago. Holy Man made an impression on them as warm, friendly, personable, and He said a lot of stuff that seemed to be agreeable. They lowered their guard. Now the rest of us have to pay the consequences for it.

Don’t blame me. I voted for the non-lawyers.

Thanks to blogger friend Daniel J. Summers for his link up at the Hello Kitty of Bloggin’.

Cracked was wondering: What if movie titles told us what we needed to know before we watched the movie? They came up with thirty different ways to improve what’s already come out.

Hat tip to Linkiest.

For the last couple of years my girlfriend and I have been going through all the rigors of school with my thirteen-year-old son, while his mother gets him for the summer & does the fun stuff with him. This upcoming year it’s getting switched around, so the other household can yell at him about P.E. clothes in the laundry & homework & grades & what-not and I’ll be geocaching with him and hiking out in the mountains. I’m really looking forward to this.

He and I have been coming up with this list, which has just been shared between our two noggins. Thought I’d finally jot it down. He’s coming back over next weekend, so this may be subject to some revision.

The list is a list of patterns that are taken on when films come out in installments. The film series take on one out of a narrow selection of quality curves, and there aren’t too many of these. That’s what the list tries to capture. It is a list, of curves, of film franchises.

See if this matches your perception.

Superman/Batman/Jaws:

The first installment makes history; the second one is almost as good. And then there’s a huge shake-up, lots of new faces, and when the third installment comes out the quality takes an enormous step down. This brings another shake-up, followed by a fourth installment which can only be described as toxic. The franchise is effectively killed.

Star Wars/Godfather:

The first installment is mind-blowing and the second one is even better. Someone gets the idea that all the money in the world will be free for the taking, if only the series can be made more kid-friendly. And so there’s a third installment that is supposed to appeal to a whole new generation. The messages are shallow, the characters are more doe-eyed and sympathetic, the dialogue is contrived. People buy the trilogy on disc but they only watch the first two.

Indiana Jones/Die Hard:

The first installment revolutionizes film-making but the second one is gawdawful. The third one is somewhere in between the two, kinda fun but stretches credibility with the audience. Everything is put on hold for a generation or so, and then a fourth installment comes out that’s great summer fun, but not very believable, and of course the central figure is kinda old.

Star Trek/Star Wars Prequels:

Something happened previously that brings a whole lot of breathless anticipation for the first episode. The producers take advantage of this pre-built audience and release a first installment that is a load of crap. Fans bubble forth with a fiery acidic rage, and purely out of necessity the writers come up with a stronger story arc that saves the day.

The Mummy/Poltergeist/Zorro/Cannonball Run/Creepshow/Darkman/Porky’s/Spiderman:

The first installment is decent enough but the second one gets a little bit silly and the third one is sillier. Somehow, people just feel it in the air that each successive installment is going to be worse than the one that came before. The higher and higher Roman numerals are just a way of thumbing one’s nose at the audience, and by the time it gets up to “IX” the subtitle is going to be “Look, We’re Just Wasting Your Time and Money Okay??”

(Insert Name of Video Game Here):

All the movies are made out of some kind of video game, and they all suck.

Cheesecake Nazi (n.)

No, it has nothing to do with No Cheesecake For You! It refers to someone who siezes control of an entire conversation, so that no politics may be discussed and for that matter nothing of any intellectual depth may be discussed either. Stop it! Time for dessert! There’s cheesecake!

The Cheesecake Nazi turns the conversation toward intellectual sherbet, because this is what everybody wants…whether they want it or not.

The Cheesecake Nazi is a dictator who dictates from a position of apathy. The Cheesecake Nazi doesn’t care about politics. He/she detests any talk whatsoever about authoritarians/libertarians, Republicans/democrats, liberals/conservatives. Therefore, the Cheesecake Nazi requests a cessation of any such talk since there’s been plenty enough of it already. Except, oddly, the cessation is requested when the talk has barely just begun, often at the Cheesecake Nazi’s prodding in the first place. And it isn’t a request. It’s a command. Cheesecake Nazi presumes to speak on behalf of everyone in the room. Everyone is sick to death of the contention…everyone who counts, that is.

The Cheesecake Nazi, for someone who doesn’t give a fig about liberals or conservatives, shows an oddly consistent predilection toward bringing the conversation to a sudden halt at the moment when it most benefits the liberal and causes the greatest injury to the conservative.

Liberal accuses conservative of being a racist; conservative defends himself — Stop it! Everyone’s sick of this! Let’s move on, there’s yummy cheesecake.

Based on my comments over here.

Cross-posted at Cassy’s place.

Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me…

…and what a delightful present. Although I’m sure it gives the man no joy to be writing it.

Don’t be too hard on yourself Karl. Lots of blame to go ’round.

Seven years ago today, in a speech on the Iraq war, Sen. Ted Kennedy fired the first shot in an all-out assault on President George W. Bush’s integrity. “All the evidence points to the conclusion,” Kennedy said, that the Bush administration “put a spin on the intelligence and a spin on the truth.” Later that day Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle told reporters Mr. Bush needed “to be forthcoming” about the absence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

Thus began a shameful episode in our political life whose poisonous fruits are still with us.

The next morning, Democratic presidential candidates John Kerry and John Edwards joined in. Sen. Kerry said, “It is time for a president who will face the truth and tell the truth.” Mr. Edwards chimed in, “The administration has a problem with the truth.”

The battering would continue, and it was a monument to hypocrisy and cynicism. All these Democrats had said, like Mr. Bush did, that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD. Of the 110 House and Senate Democrats who voted in October 2002 to authorize the use of force against his regime, 67 said in congressional debate that Saddam had these weapons. This didn’t keep Democrats from later alleging something they knew was false—that the president had lied America into war.

Senate Intelligence Chairman Bob Graham organized a bipartisan letter in December 2001 warning Mr. Bush that Saddam’s “biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs . . . may be back to pre-Gulf War status,” and enhanced by “longer-range missiles that will threaten the United States and our allies.” Yet two years later, he called for Mr. Bush’s impeachment for having said Saddam had WMD.

On July 9, 2004, Mr. Graham’s fellow Democrat on Senate Intelligence, Jay Rockefeller, charged that the Bush administration “at all levels . . . used bad information to bolster the case for war.” But in his remarks on Oct. 10, 2002, supporting the war resolution, he said that “Saddam’s existing biological and chemical weapons capabilities pose real threats to America.”

Even Kennedy, who opposed the war resolution, nonetheless said the month before the vote that Saddam’s “pursuit of lethal weapons of mass destruction cannot be tolerated.” But he warned if force were employed, the Iraqi dictator “may decide he has nothing to lose by using weapons of mass destruction himself or by sharing them with terrorists.”
:
We know President Bush did not intentionally mislead the nation. Saddam Hussein was deposed and eventually hung for his crimes. Iraq is a democracy and an ally instead of an enemy of America. Al Qaeda suffered tremendous blows in the “land between the two rivers.” But Democrats lost more than the election in 2004. In telling lie after lie, week after week, many lost their honor and blackened their reputations.

History will eventually be cleaning up the mess here, I think. When Ted Kennedy expressed something, there was always this illusion hanging in the air that The Lion of the Senate was speaking for “everybody.” Change the personalities involved, change the voices, wait awhile, and then make the decision…it turns out all different. Because people aren’t too hung up on what was fashionable a handful of years before.

By the way, congratulations once again on your victory, Republican Senator Scott Brown.

But there won’t be any passionate, widespread rage — that’s the thing. Some purveyors of thought are hated and vilified. Like Titus Oates, Joe McCarthy and Susan Smith. They don’t have to affix their names to outright falsehoods — what they say can be technically true, and once it falls out of fashion they’ll still be excoriated. Crucified by a public enraged at themselves. This is what happened Bush & crew.

Being a left-winger means you never have to worry about it. You get to lie, and when the lie is discovered the hole thing just quietly slips down the memory hole. Al Sharpton can push his lies about Tawana Brawley as much as he wants, Mike Nifong can do the same thing with Crystal Gail Mangum. The courts & commissions & boards of review may impose consequences, but there will be no hate-fest, no burning of effigies.

The public’s funny that way.

But in this one, eventually we’re going to have to admit to what’s true and what isn’t.

Here’s something that is rather peculiar to me: People like me have been ignored consistently here. I say “like me” to refer to my own opinion, which can best be summed up as “pop Saddam like a zit, WMD or no, then get ready to bust a whole lot more.”

I’m not alone in thinking this. But there are a lot of other people who expressed support for the war on the mistaken assumption that these weapons were there. Okay, I get that. So it’s all about what motivates people to make the decisions they make, is that it? That’s what the anger is all about?

Then what about these foreign powers that sat on the United Nations Security Council, some with veto power, who were found after the invasion to be up to their eyebrows in Oil For Food money? Where’s the outrage about that?

It’s a legitimate question. Mr. Rove makes legitimate points. If the time hasn’t come to re-think all this by now, fine, someday it will be unavoidable. And the force involved is only going to increase with time, as we learn the hard way that war cannot be ended by legislation. It is a natural albeit tragic consequence of human interaction, it will always be around, and to affix it to the neck of some public figure in recent memory, as if this one individual is the only reason we have it, is patently absurd.

Although I suppose if you are looking for a singular scapegoat, Saddam Hussein would make just as much sense as anybody else.

Brian Riedl, writing in the Wall Street Journal:

President Obama and congressional Democrats are blaming their trillion-dollar budget deficits on the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003. Letting these tax cuts expire is their answer. Yet the data flatly contradict this “tax cuts caused the deficits” narrative. Consider the three most persistent myths:

&nbull; The Bush tax cuts wiped out last decade’s budget surpluses. Sen. John Kerry (D., Mass.), for example, has long blamed the tax cuts for having “taken a $5.6 trillion surplus and turned it into deficits as far as the eye can see.” That $5.6 trillion surplus never existed. It was a projection by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in January 2001 to cover the next decade. It assumed that late-1990s economic growth and the stock-market bubble (which had already peaked) would continue forever and generate record-high tax revenues. It assumed no recessions, no terrorist attacks, no wars, no natural disasters, and that all discretionary spending would fall to 1930s levels.

The projected $5.6 trillion surplus between 2002 and 2011 will more likely be a $6.1 trillion deficit through September 2011. So what was the cause of this dizzying, $11.7 trillion swing? I’ve analyzed CBO’s 28 subsequent budget baseline updates since January 2001. These updates reveal that the much-maligned Bush tax cuts, at $1.7 trillion, caused just 14% of the swing from projected surpluses to actual deficits.

The bulk of the swing resulted from economic and technical revisions (33%), other new spending (32%), net interest on the debt (12%), the 2009 stimulus (6%) and other tax cuts (3%). Specifically, the tax cuts for those earning more than $250,000 are responsible for just 4% of the swing. [bold emphasis mine]

Hat tip to Boortz.

I measure the weakness of a liberal argument according to how quickly the person who offers it, abandons it and lapses back into “Yeah, but those OTHER guys…”

According to that, I rate Ms. Powers’ rebuttal two minutes and three seconds. Cut that in half because they were talking over each other the whole time. One minute, one and a half seconds.

That’s a weak argument. I’ll bet if I built my own garbage bag out of newspapers, it might not make the trip but it’ll be more than a minute before that thing gives way. I can hold my breath for a minute. I can’t make a pot of coffee in a minute.

There is nothing you can say against the Obama administration, now, that won’t paint its apologists into that sad pathetic corner in a matter of seconds. Nothing. Everything leads to that, because there’s noplace else for it to go. “Yeah maybe, but what did you have to say when BUSH…”

“Obama” is an ancient Kenyan word that roughly translates to “indefensible.”

If you aren’t talking like eddiebear, or at least feeling a powerful compulsion to, you’re not paying attention.

Fucking dinofuck that shit with the fuckingly flaming fucklog of fuck and financial fuckitude. Fuck it so hard, its asshole gets ripped through its throat and jackfucked. And fuck it forever, just because I am fucking pissed.

Oh, and fuck anybody and everybody who helped foster this yodelfucking of the American Dream and future by piling up fucking debt on programs we don’t need, the people don’t want, and are less popular outside of the newsroom at MSNBC than getting the unwanted Glamour Goatse Giveaway from Gigafuck the Great.

This is fucking why November cannot come fast enough for me. Fuck these people for sentencing my daughter to a shittier future than I had at her age by sentencing her to be a financial ward of the state, and all of the restrictions that accompany such designation. Fuck these people for weakening our country. Fuck them for making all of our lives more shitty in order to push through some fucking bullshit agenda. And fuck them for claiming that wanting something better for my child is somehow analogous to the original sin of our nation.

Any fuckmink who helps foster this bullshit through needs to get their fucking bloated ass voted out post haste and replaced with people who will do something to try to stop this shit. Fuck anybody with a fetid bag of fuck who thinks compromise with the left in order to weaken a bad bill is better than getting tut-tutted by Chris Matthews if they say, “Fuck No!” to bad legislation. And fuck anybody who dares to fucking call me a bigot for opposing this shit.

Fuck you, anybody who helped fuck everything over. And get the fuck out of the way, so that us “bad” people can save the country and the future.

Aw c’mon, bear. Let them call you a racist anus-wart if it makes them happy. Let it hang over your head like a bad smell. There’s cheesecake!

It’s Jordan.

Politico. File under “Feeding on their own”:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi bashed White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs Tuesday night, even as the president’s top spokesman continued to backpedal from his assertion that Democrats could lose control of the House in the November election.

The fusillade from Pelosi and other Democrats at a closed-door meeting escalated an already fiery clash between the White House and its own party in Congress. During the tense evening meeting, the speaker grilled the top White House aide in attendance, senior legislative affairs staffer Dan Turton, about the impact of Gibbs’ comments.

“How could [Gibbs] know what is going on in our districts?” Pelosi told her members in the caucus meeting in the basement of the Capitol Tuesday night. “Some may weigh his words more than others. We have made our disagreement known to the White House.”

Then she turned to Turton and asked him to acknowledge that Gibbs’ comments had been damaging to the Democratic cause, Democratic insiders said. Gibbs was not in the room for this meeting.

Ah…really, when you think about it, it’s impossible for Gibbs’ comments to have been “damaging to the democrat cause.” Unless, that is, the democrats have been marketing themselves — and some have suggested for quite awhile that this is the case — to people who are unintelligent and/or are altogether missing any kind of working memory.

The democrat party loses favor with voters here and there, now & then. In 2000, 1980, 1968, 1952, 1920. We fire them when we figure out their policies don’t work. The same thing happens with the GOP.

If they were simply able to separate themselves from this “People’s Revolution” nonsense, it wouldn’t be so damaging. But they can’t separate themselves from it. Every single campaign has to return to the same kids’ fantasy:

America has been held hostage because of the dirty ol’ so-and-so’s who get erections over the idea of war, want to give tax breaks to the wealthy, build more prisons and guns, turn American into a theocracy, and — worst of all — remind brittle hostile women with daddy issues of their dads. We have an election, the democrat party wins, and the streets turn to gold and candy and marshallows and the unicorns are freed and the chains and leg irons melt off our bodies and sunbeams trickle on down and gas is free and…and…and…Puppies. Kittens. Rainbows.

If they’d just tear themselves away from the “Our Election Is The Beginning of Nirvana” craze, they wouldn’t have to answer that most awkward of questions: If they fix everything and make life all perfect, how come we keep getting sick of ’em?

Cross-posted at Cassy’s place.

The Bastidge was required, if you read things literally, to disclose his race.

Thought this was still America. Maybe I was mistaken.

I thought his solution was most creative. It’s still unsatisfactory.

The Founding Fathers shot the British for levying new taxes all willy-nilly, claiming the colonials were represented “virtually.” Shot them. Blew ’em up. Sank their ships. I wonder what they’d do about shenanigans like these. Seriously, are we human beings or jelly beans?

Can’t remember if I did this before. My memory says absolutely yes, but my search engine says absolutely not.

Regardless, it just gets funnier every time I look at it.

Changing the shirt colors was a stupid move on Rick Berman’s part, one of many. Yes it’s cheesy and campy and kinda stupid. But I still remember my earliest childhood memories when Captain Kirk would announce “Spock, Bones, Scotty, Chekov, Uhura, Sulu and Lieutenant Kowalski meet me in Transporter Room Three.” And we’d all look at each other and go, “UH OH!”

Good times.

So sez I.

Portfolio is here. Hat tip to William Teach, posting at Linkiest.

…which is the slang-speak we use here, at The Blog That Nobody Reads (anyway), for — you guessed it — FaceBook! And yes, keen-eyed observers have noticed that although we are indeed on it, we really don’t spend much time there and we take it a little bit less than completely seriously.

As a blog, we go back to 2004, the year of Facebook’s origin…way before it emerged as any kind of a phenom. It’s just hard for us to see it as a serious player.

Melissa has a study in hand and it’s a little mind-blowing, although the contents therein are not altogether unexpected.

Young women are becoming more and more dependent on social media and checking on their social networks, according to a new study released earlier today by Oxygen Media and Lightspeed Research. In fact, as many as one-third of women aged 18-34 check Facebook when they first wake up, even before they get to the bathroom. [emphasis mine]

That’s a little bit excessive. Me, I power on the mini-notebook on my way into the bathroom, and when I come back out again I check my e-mail…then find out what’s going on in the world. Then maybe blog something while the coffee’s brewing.

See, that’s sensible. Blogging is a more manual process. And it doesn’t really revolve around feedback. Facebook is a cocktail party, blogging is more like a billboard.

Hey, while we’re discussing differences between blogging and FaceBook, let’s dig into my “Beat Up On FaceBook” file. It’s fun to make fun of FaceBook.

1. FaceBook is a blog you wind up with a little key
2. FaceBook is a blog printed up with pleasing primary and pastel colors
3. FaceBook is a blog that, when you drop it in the bathtub, it floats
4. Blog is to CAD program as FaceBook is to an Etch-a-Sketch
5. If FaceBook was a movie, it would be a guilty-pleasure flick…like “Joe vs. the Volcano” or “Road House”
6. FaceBook is a blog you can gnaw on to help your teeth come out
7. Forget my earlier snarky comment about an automatic transmission; you have to pedal FaceBook with your feet to make it go
8. FaceBook reminds me of that crocodile in the comic strip who can’t kill the zebra living next door and his parents get all ashamed of him when he orders out for cardboard tubs of fried chicken
9. FaceBook is a blog that says one of five things when you pull on its li’l cord
10. FaceBook is a blog you push along on the ground while making an engine sound with your lips
11. Facebook is the Jar Jar Binks of blogging, with much better public relations
12. Facebook is a blog carrying a little tiny dog around in a purse
13. “Blogger” uses a bottle opener; WordPress twists the cap off with its bare hand; FaceBook punches a little hole in the box with the straw that was taped on to the side
14. If “House of Eratosthenes” resided primarily on FaceBook, it would be made out of Lincoln Logs
15. FaceBook is the “Twilight Series” of blogs
16. FaceBook is a blog that comes with crayons and a puzzle
17. If FaceBook was really a book, it would be something by Dr. Seuss
18. If FaceBook was an entree, it would be a grilled cheese sandwich that your momma could’ve made you at home
19. Blogging can be crackers, beer nuts or cashews; FaceBook is Teddy Grahams and, sometimes, Cheerios in a little sandwich baggie
20. When FaceBook writes its own name, it wishes it ended with the letter “i” so it could dot it with a little heart

Technology/Office type stuff. Yes, Morgan is indulging his rare habit of writing about his vocation, and on a Friday night.

This one just spoke to me, and it’s been in my “tall” stack of stuff ever since. Time to put it where I can search for it, it’s decent enough. And so, so true.

Consider the following 3 step model of project management:

1. Proposal. The engineering team proposes a cool idea for a product that will make millions of $, Rs, Baht or other currency.

2. Random Wait. Management makes a non-committal response and waits a random amount of time. Some management styles encourage their managers to produce an intermittent buzzing noise during this time, to convey to the team that they are working.

The engineering team starts work.

3. Drop! Manager says “No!”. The project gets cancelled.

The job of the engineering team is to get the product finished and in the customer’s hands before the “No!” descends. [emphasis mine]

Right about now you’re double-checking that link to see if I got this from Dilbert. Nope.

The last two lines are killer, and I mean that in a good way.

Survival Strategy: Since projects can get the axe at any time, the only reliable way of getting the project out of the door is to have finished the work before going to management for approval.

Then, once approval is granted, you use the time gained to work on the next project. <grin>

It’s as good as any other, as far as I’m concerned. Wisdom from my blogger buddy Mark up in Puget Sound…

There is a brand of conservatism loose in the country that is seeking to compete at the game of “cool” with our more practiced liberal friends. Personified by the likes of GOP Chairman Michael Steele and to a lesser degree Mike Huckabee, they are square sorts who instead of embracing their squareness try to come across as “hip” or “with it” by adopting what the culture deems as cool at any given moment in the form of painfully forced “jive talk” or playing bass in a TV band. As soon as they pull this “Look, I can be cool too” persona out of their bag of tricks they have lost me. Like Pat Boone covering a Fats Domino tune, it might be a perfectly nice song but he is bound to butcher it. Better he stick to sappy ballads and crooning love songs because that is who he is. I may not like his music but I can respect him for remaining true to himself and being comfortable in his own skin. Isn’t that the real definition of being cool?

Daphne is frustrated, demoralized and fed up.

Hope Is Not A Strategy

A break was in order, a pass of a few days from my usual daily walk in this wired world of breaking news and streaming hot words. Ten seconds after I fired this baby up, surfing with the speed of light, I had a serious craving for a hit of good blotter to go along with my coffee.

Seems nothing has changed, the world is still strange and people continue to hash irate consonants about the strangeness of life. Fireworks flew, governments produced their usual bucketful of farce and we, the opinionated people, made a lot of pointless noise.

I can see November from my window held particular sway in the faux rebel wing of the conservative electorate this weekend. Children’s wishes blown on the fluff of dead dandelion heads, blind lambs placed in the lion’s mouth, the faith of a new-born saviour expected to rise from the dead ashes of a corrupt body politic.

The insane delusion that Washington will behave with prudent sanity once a new slate of fresh Republicans are seated seems to be predicated on a few gossamer threads pulled from gilded fairy tales. A wisp of nothing supports this ardent belief, but it has become the holy grail of conservative punditry.

Obama and his cohort of mendacious bottom feeders continued to live up to my low expectations. I’m beginning to wonder if the majority of his administration aren’t slightly retarded. Which made me consider the possibility that black folks in general might be wobbling on the shaky edge of low intelligence as they’re the only ones still enthusiastically singing on the president’s bandwagon. (But, hey, we still have Michael Steele.) Hell, even the rich West coast liberals are fleeing their infatuation with the golden boy like he’s a walking cholera epidemic and we all know they’re not exactly the brightest bulbs decorating the democratic plank.

I must say, I’m not familiar with this “insane delusion that Washington will behave with prudent sanity once a new slate of fresh Republicans are seated.” That’s a new one on me. Most of the people who are looking forward to November with cautious hope, like Yours Truly, are thinking more along these lines: Things are messed up and getting worse. Kiddies are in charge. They don’t seem to be planning a goddamned fucking thing anywhere — it’s all just “display the emotions we expect you to display,” whether you are in their administration, on their (my) payroll, or happen to be working in the custard shop offering to comp their orders if they’ll lower your taxes.

The kiddies running everything come from a world in which there is something sacriligious about saying: “I have observed A and B and I see A causes B. Let’s look at ratcheting down A if we want to see less of B, or bringing in a whole lot more A if we happen to like B.” In other words, no cause-and-effect thinking allowed. You might say they have established a religious order against it.

So let’s yank out that one element. If you don’t live in a world in which things happen because of other things, you cannot vote. Go home, watch television, grow up for four more years, and then we’ll see if you have made that first step toward handling real responsibilities.

This system is not quite that broken. And it is durable. It can handle people reasonably disagreeing about the facts, what is known from the facts, what is to be done in response to what is going on as has been derived from the facts. Dissent leads to discourse, and discourse is the lubricant of a republic like ours.

But it’s got to be discourse among adults who live in the real world. Purge the system of all the mental-kids who’ve consciously decided they can’t handle it.

How did I sum it up yesterday…

Anyone suffering from a self-destructive impulse can’t vote. Anyone carrying a large burden of guilt, which can be relieved only by pretending wet is dry and up is down, cannot vote. Anyone who’d rather watch American Idol than educate themselves about the issues so they can vote knowledgeably, should go right ahead. Fast forward through every commercial for all I care. Just stay home. It’s what you want to do anyway.

Then we can quibble about whether there’s such a thing as a Laffer Curve (there is), whether we should keep drugs illegal (hell yes), and whether our 51 bankrupt governments suffer from a spending problem or a revenue problem (it’s not a revenue problem).

But the — let’s call it what it is — BULLSHIT about apology tours, “Interstate Commerce Clause on Steroids”, global warming, suing Arizona, “Sit down and talk out our differences with our enemies,” and this-is-the-first-experiment-with-socialized-medicine-[that-will-work]-I-really-really-promise…will all come to a stop. As it should.

We lunged down this bunny trail of despair when we decided…I say “we,” because no one single individual living or dead seems to own this…that we are a “democracy,” and a democracy is more “robust” or something if more people participate in it. If the bar is lowered. If we pour some silly ideas into a great big stewpot to intermingle with the sensible ones.

It’s just not true.

We live in a representative democratic republic. One in which The People, not just the elected & appointed officials who serve them, have responsibilities they/we need to meet. It is a system that relies on a presumption that The People know how to think sensibly, and are doing so.

Matt Ridley writes in the Huffington Post:

When I was a student, in the 1970s, the world was coming to an end. The adults told me so. They said the population explosion was unstoppable, mass famine was imminent, a cancer epidemic caused by chemicals in the environment was beginning, the Sahara desert was advancing by a mile a year, the ice age was retuning, oil was running out, air pollution was choking us and nuclear winter would finish us off. There did not seem to be much point in planning for the future. I remember a fantasy I had – that I would make my way to the Hebrides, off the west coast of Scotland, and live off the land so I could survive these holocausts at least till the cancer got me.

I am not making this up. By the time I was 21 years old I realized that nobody had ever said anything optimistic to me – in a lecture, a television program or even a conversation in a bar – about the future of the planet and its people, at least not that I could recall. Doom was certain.
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I began to pay attention and a few years ago I started to research a book on the subject. I was astounded by what I discovered. Global per capita income, corrected for inflation, had trebled in my lifetime, life expectancy had increased by one third, child mortality had fallen by two-thirds…
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Not only are human beings wealthier, they are also healthier, wiser, happier, more tolerant, less violent, more equal. Check it out – the data is [are] clear. Yet if anything the pessimists had only grown more certain, shrill and apocalyptic. We were facing the `end of nature’, the `coming anarchy’, a `stolen future’, our `final century’ and a climate catastrophe. Why, I began to wonder did the failure of previous predictions have so little impact on this litany?

We’re bored.

I would say all the predictions of failure and doom have themselves been doomed to failure, save for one: As life becomes more comfy and we’re faced with fewer real challenges, the bottoms of our feet and the palms of our hands, along with our bellies, have become soft. And the skin has become thin, thin, thin. Everything offends save for that which is designed, conceived and expected to say absolutely nothing.

We start to elect leaders who we must think are wonderful, pure and powerful, we aren’t allowed to utter a syllable of doubt about it — and yet they’re never actually responsible for anything.

We start to loathe ourselves. You’ll notice the world is never about to end because of an overpopulation of cats or dogs. Or locusts. It’s never because of too many cows farting. It’s always my species, but not me. How conveeeeeenient.

This means I get to toss out some orders and get extra cranky if people hesitate to follow ’em. The prophesies of doom always seem to lead back to that. Do what I tell you to do, and stop doing what I say you shouldn’t be doing, or the planet will die.

Armageddon is not breathlessly anticipated. Very rarely does anyone talk about the entire world ending, for any reason.

— Item #42 from My 42 Definitions of a Strong Society.

What Mr. Ridley saw in his youth was a great big gaggle of bossy obnoxious people, trying to take the place over. Which they did for a little while. Until we pulled our heads out of our butts. For the last couple of years we’ve been cramming ’em back in.

Hat tip to blogger friend Gerard.

…and left-wing opinion. So says Dennis Prager.

Take all the time you need. But no matter how much time you take, you probably won’t come up with any examples.

Here are examples of major world issues and what is deemed “world opinion.” They happen to all be Leftist views as well.

— hatred of President George W. Bush and admiration of President Barack Obama

— Manmade carbon emissions lead to global warming and devastation of the environment. Therefore, the world’s nations must tax carbon-based energy.

— The American invasion of Iraq was morally wrong, motivated by desire for oil.

— Israel is bad, as exemplified most recently by the Turkish flotilla incident.

— The American free-enterprise system is inferior to Europe’s welfare-state systems.

— The American health care system is inferior to that of all other wealthy countries.

This list in no way differs from a list of Leftist positions. Nor would any other list of “world opinion” positions differ in any meaningful way from Leftist positions.
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…The world’s media and virtually all international organizations are Leftist in their politics, and they both define “world opinion” and in turn shape it.

Of course, there are other powerful institutions in the world that shape public opinion. But virtually none contravene the Left-wing views of the world’s media and world organizations on world issues.

The price to be paid for betraying individuality is that you aren’t allowed any. You’re given a list of opinions you are to have, and that’s that.

Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.

— Samuel Adams

…make more sense than some other people’s deliberate thoughts.

My favorite pollster is Pew because that’s the sound lasers make. Pew! Pew!
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Saw Eclipse with SarahK. We’re now even for her carrying my child.

There were like 80 tertiary characters in Eclipse. Couldn’t they have killed off at least one to try and make some dramatic tension?
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Can’t the far left leave leading this country to people who actually kinda like it?

Hat tip to Neal Boortz.